While she waited for the Fog vortex to form, she followed the others to the to-be location of the new Fog Gate. It was funny how quickly the dungeon desensitized one to displays like the one she had just participated in, even if the actual verbal exchange had very real meaning. Most of this didn’t even feel real, as if…

“Say, does it feel to anyone else like everything down here is only mostly real?” she asked out loud, just as she caught up and dropped the knife into the vortex. Zel felt more relief than she was willing to admit at the affirmative looks and nods she received. 

“The deeper into the cogworks one ventures, the less solid the simulacrum becomes. Some degree of dissociation is expected. Blood curses remain as potent as ever, unfortunately...” the Spearman said gravely. He kept his gaze solidly affixed to the Caster, even though he looked like he wanted to do nothing more than look away.

The wall was covered in shallow scratches that formed a surprisingly faithful recreation of the dungeon’s Fog Gate glyphs, glowing faintly cyan already. Many of the lines were unnaturally clean, as if the stone itself had shifted to compensate for inaccuracies.

Tok. Tok. Tok

Still the Caster murmured in Pateirian, individual words barely even audible. It was just the tonal noises that came with the language’s pronunciation. With each line, a baleful green glow seeped outward between his cracked plates more and more intensely. Where before the glowing cracks had spread across doors, it was now the Caster himself that was cracking.

At last the Caster sucked in a long, gurgling breath and screamed a command, spitting his own blood all over the glyph as the glow became nearly too bright to withstand. Zelsys powered through, squinting just to watch. 

“Let my essence be the bridge for those who challenge the divine will!” he howled with a blood-filled mouth.

She witnessed green-glowing liquid pour from his eyes, his nose, his mouth and ears, from the myriad cracks that spread across his body. It covered him utterly and Fog-like fumes rose from it. There was no single essentia discernible within the threads of spectral gas, it was like… It was like the Caster’s very soul was being burned for fuel, the same was any Fog-breather burned metabolized essentia.

The Spearman had fallen back, staring up in disbelief. Zelsys didn’t look around to see the others’ reactions, but she assumed that they were just as bewildered as she was.

“I am the gate, the key, the path! Open!”

The green became blue, then red, then yellow, and so on, cycling through every possible and impossible colour in a flash. A second later it was gone, and the empty husk of what had once been the Caster fell to the ground to the clattering of his staff against the floor panels.

With an empty-eyed stare, the Spearman stood to his feet before the newly-formed Fog Gate, barren and grey as it was. Its edges rippled and warbled, expanding and contracting as if the membrane of a breathing lung with no frame to contain it. His eyes wandered down to the corpse and he wiped it away with his foot. The chitin fell to dust at the slightest touch, leaving behind only a shining, iridescent stone the size and rough shape of a plum.

“Was it really so bad as to use the last resort?” he asked the stone after picking it up. With a shake of his head, he put down the hand in which he held it and looked over in the party’s direction.

A heavy, shuddering sigh escaped his mandibles, “D-do whatever else you need to do before you pass, any further preparation. The Gate will hold for a while, as will the wall. There’s… No need to preserve the corpse, now. After all this, he’ll be reshelled in a golem.”

“I’m good, you?” Strol said, looking over to Zef. When she nodded in confirmation, he looked to the Inquisitor.

After a moment of hesitation, the Inquisitor reached into her coat and pulled out a second gun, sucking in a deep breath before Fog clouded the inside of her mask. Murmured Grekurian could be heard coming from her, though it was rendered into just noise by the addition of that gas mask. All Zel could make out was a voice that sounded surprisingly like her own, and the brief silences between individual words.

Spectral tendrils of Fog slithered down her arms, gripping the two guns and raising them above her head. The Inquisitor reached into her coat again, pulled out another pair, and repeated the process again, this time what she said sounded different, but somehow connected to her previous words. A third pair, a third line of incantation, this one bearing a sense of finality. 

Even still, she reached into her coat once more, but these guns remained in her hands. 

“Just how many guns do you have on you?” Zel asked, genuinely curious, forgetting that the Inquisitor didn’t speak most of the time.

“Eight,” Strolvath guessed, then looked to the Inquisitor. “It’s eight, isn’t it?”

She gave a slow nod, a gust of Fog venting from her mask’s exhaust port. Then came the simple act of placing fragile objects into Fog Storage - just bottles and rations, under the assumption that they’d be damaged beyond use in the coming fight. 

“Where does the gate lead? Any idea?” Zef asked the Spearman as she slipped the Tablet into its place next to her cleaver.

“It’s a one-way transit to the Core Chamber’s gate. You’re going straight into the mouth of hell,” he answered.

An idea sparked in Zel’s mind at those words and she asked, “Can we toss objects through before we go?”

After a moment of consideration, the locust answered, “...Sure, but the first thing to pass through will destabilize the Gate and leave you with half a minute at best to pass yourselves.”

The slayer turned to her compatriots and pulled one of her two remaining grenades off her ammo belt, “How many of these and phials of CP-T do we have left?”